Chapter 1069 - 877: When the Statue Ripens

On the second day after the fall of Grey Rock City, Victor set up a temporary command center at the Earl’s Mansion, arranging for the injured soldiers to be transferred into the city for treatment in batches, while multiple squads were dispatched to clear the streets and bury the bodies.

That evening, he climbed the West City Wall alone. The setting sun was like blood, casting a dark red hue over the broken parapets and charred walls. Victor stood on the wall, looking down at the city he had just conquered, holding the statue he brought from the camp.

The sapphire in the statue’s eye sockets glowed with a cold and eerie glimmer in the twilight, and the internal radiance was much brighter than before the siege.

The Duke hovered below the clouds, taking in the entire scene.

For the next five days, he maintained a safe distance, continuously observing the changes in the statue.

Although the war had ended, the energy absorbed by the statue did not stop.

The residual negative emotions on the battlefield—fear, anger, despair, pain, and so on—like countless thin gray wisps of smoke, floated towards the statue from the corpses that hadn’t yet been cleaned up at the base of the walls, from the charred remnants shattered by war, and from the low moans coming from the wounded barracks.

Threads of emerald Life Force intertwined with the gray-black smoky negative emotions, like two entwined streams, continuously flowing into the sapphires in the statue’s eye sockets.

The inner glow of the gemstones became deeper and deeper, gradually turning from light blue to deep blue, then faintly revealing a hint of eerie green, like dark currents surging in the deepest part of the sea.

Through the perception of Life Rules, the Duke could see these changes clearly.

He discovered that the Life Force absorbed by the statue was undergoing some extremely complex transformation within rather than simple storage.

Life Force and negative emotions were forcibly compressed at the core of the gemstone by some Rule Power, like two incompatible liquids being stirred together by an external force, continuously colliding and annihilating, resulting in a new energy form he had never sensed before.

The nature of this energy was extremely peculiar, neither purely Life Energy nor merely Death Energy, more like a crystal formed at the boundary between life and death under extreme conditions.

He vaguely speculated that what was being condensed inside the statue might be fundamentally linked to the Philosopher’s Stone but far surpassed an ordinary Philosopher’s Stone in quality and hierarchy.

The Philosopher’s Stone refined with hundreds of lives by Count Cadwell merely compressed and condensed Life Force, as crude as pig iron smelted directly from ore.

In contrast, Victor’s statue used the entire war as a furnace, with the soldiers’ blood and will from both sides as fuel, conducting a deeper level of purification and tempering on the level of Rules.

If the Philosopher’s Stone was pig iron, then what the statue might eventually produce could be called refined steel.

More importantly, the statue was still unfinished.

The Duke could clearly perceive through Life Rules that the energy transformation process within the statue was far from complete, like a pot of stew slowly cooking but still a long way from evaporating the moisture and condensing into crystals.

Victor was evidently aware of this, so he used the excuse of resting to garrison in Grey Rock City for a full five days.

On the morning of the sixth day, the bugle call of assemblage rang out again in the Rebel Army’s camp.

After five days of rest, the soldiers’ physical strength had basically recovered. Those lightly wounded were reorganized into the combat sequence, while the severely injured were left in a temporary wounded barracks in Grey Rock City.

A new supply convoy arriving from the rear brought food, arrows, and replacement parts for the siege equipment, as well as a supplementary force composed of newly recruited volunteer soldiers.

Victor integrated these new soldiers into each main regiment, combining the new with the old to quickly complete the reorganization of the forces.

By noon, the large army broke camp and set out, with tens of thousands of men advancing slowly along the main road leading into the heart of the Kingdom from Grey Rock City.

The Duke turned into a breeze, following distantly in the high skies behind the army.

Over the following two months, Victor’s army bulldozed through the vast territories of the northwestern Osseron Kingdom like a juggernaut.

The Duke witnessed battle after bloody siege, each with its unique savagery and grimness, yet sharing common patterns.

After each war, Victor would place the statue in the center of the battlefield, devouring the death and pain lingering in the air like a greedy beast.

Twelve days after the fall of Grey Rock City, Victor’s army arrived at Jericho Castle.

This renowned mining fortress city stood at the western foot of the Iron Jaws Mountain Range, with walls taller and thicker than those of Grey Rock City, and was defended by a distant cousin of Earl Marshall, an old soldier notorious for his brutality.

The siege lasted five days, longer than the attack on Grey Rock City.

On the walls of Jericho Castle, the defenders mounted dozens of heavy crossbows modified by Dwarven craftsmanship, each volley capable of pushing back the Rebel Army’s siege hammers by several yards.

Victor adjusted his tactics multiple times, first dispatching a suicide squad to climb the walls on the night of the third day, attempting to open the gates from the inside.

After this failed, he resorted to a fire attack, launching oil-soaked bundles of straw into the city with catapults, causing numerous fires within the city.

Finally, in the early hours of the sixth day, a team of rebel engineers dug a tunnel that reached the inside of the city walls, blowing open the gates from within.